Everything Coworking

The Everything Coworking podcast shares trends and how-tos for coworking operators and anyone following this exploding trend. Jamie owns coworking spaces in Chicago and Palo Alto under the brand Enerspace Coworking. She is also the Executive Director of the Global Workspace Association.

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Jamie Russo announces her new role as Executive Director of Global Workspace Association as well as a new show format including industry trends in the coworking world including Grind/Verizon news, the GCUC 2016 location and a new tool released from CoShare.

My guest today is Dr. Tracy Brower. Tracy shares insights on how corporations are supporting work-life integration, and how corporate office design and third space design can support work-life integration and uses her experience to share some suggestions on how to use research and insights to design better work spaces.

Dr. Brower is a work environment sociologist and Global Vice President of Workplace Vitality for Mars Drinks. She is the author of Bring Work to Life by Bringing Life to Work: A Guide for Leaders and Organizations which focuses on work-life integration and abundance. Over her career, she has had the opportunity to engage with a wide range of organizations including many of the Fortune 500. She is a three-time recipient of the CoreNet Luminary Award for speaking and a recipient of the University of Houston Alexander Real Estate Innovative Practices Award. Tracy has also taught university courses in management and organizational effectiveness.

This week my guest is Hasan Mirjan, Founder of Spheremail and Spherepad. He started both about the same time. As he shares during the interview, he started Spherepad, a coworking space, in 2008 in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood and at the time, friends and family warned him of a low chance of success given the bad economy and an unproven location. So to hedge his bet, he started Spheremail, a virtual mail management platform, to diversify his revenue streams. It turns out that both ventures were successful. Spheremail is now being used by shared workspaces across the country and around the world.

Today we’re going to talk about how to hire a Community Manager for your shared space. I share the process I followed for my most recent hire and a tweak I made to the job title and description that might be considered controversial in the coworking world. Check the show notes for links to the resources I used and for a copy of my job description.

Today we’re going to talk about virtual mail. It’s something that folks in the business center world have been doing for a long time, and it’s really lucrative for them. Their view is that your revenue has finite potential if you are only selling memberships for space but a virtual membership revenue stream has infinite upside. It’s also a nice way to introduce people to your services and engage them in the community.

I discuss how it works and my personal experience with it at Enerspace Coworking, which is the coworking space brand that I also run.

Adam Friedberg is a Managing Broker and Partner in Brand & Company, a real estate company in River Forest, IL. Adam got into the coworking industry accidentally - he and his partners started co-locating their business associates - architects, other real estate colleagues, bankers, in the office building that they had purchased. They saw great stragegic value in having their professional network in the same office for easy collaboration and relationship-building.

They've recently extended this shared space success and started River Forest Kitchen which is, as the name implies, a shared commercial kitchen space in River Forest, IL.

Adam thinks that if you're in real estate and you don't see where the world is going in terms of shared space and services, you should get on the bus. Learn more about coworking from his real estate perspective in this eposide.

In today’s episode, I chat with Matthew Dunstan, author of The Coworking Revolution: Four Secrets to Successfully Working for Yourself, just published May 2015. Matthew spoke at GCUC Australia and I wanted to share his story.

I read Matthew’s book on a recent flight and was really struck at the time by his perspective on the problems that coworking solves. And I have to say that since our interview, I can’t stop thinking about his ideas. We talk a lot in coworking about this idea of “serendipitous interactions” - this idea that if you collide with enough people, you’ll make connections that would otherwise never present themselves. And these connections should help you personally and professionally.

The thing I love about Matthew’s value proposition for coworking is that he’s suggesting that hope is not a strategy. I read that book some time ago and love that title and it’s really making me think about what we’re doing in coworking spaces to facilitate more than just lucky conversations at member events.

I know you’ll enjoy our conversation but I also highly recommend the book.

I love talking shop with Chris. He launched his successful marketing business out of a coworking space from scratch and is directing his coworking passion towards helping other entrepreneurs be successful by introducing them to coworking. He interviews entrpereneurs on his weekly podcast show called Coworking Success.

Chris shares his perspective on what coworking will look like in 2020, some marketing tips for coworking space owners and some personal approaches to keeping himself in top business shape.

Today I talk with Diana Rothschild, current CEO of coworking space Nextspace and founder of NextKids, a highly sought-after combination of coworking and childcare under the same roof. She founded NextKids in partnership with NextSpace, a coworking company with 9 locations in the Bay Area and Chicago. She recently became the CEO.

There is what I would call a desperate cry for the model that Diana is creating. We get right down to unpacking why this model is so hard and Diana shares from her perspective the three critical things you need to have in place to pursue this model.

We also talk about Diana’s perspective on the future of NextKids and the coworking/daycare combo model.

Today I chat with Scott Chambers, president of the Global Workspace Association and Chief Operating Officer of Pacific Workplaces which has 15 locations in the Bay Area. Scott has been in the industry for over 23 years and is providing thought leadership as Business centers navigate the quickly-changing landscape of shared workspace. Scott and I chat about the history of the industry and how business centers are changing to stay relevant. We also get the scoop on the Alex Hillman/Adam Tetrus road show that GWA is sponsoring called “SMASH the stereotypes on shared workspaces and modern workers."

Meet Dana Horst and learn about her journey from a love of writing, arts, and theatre, to becoming the Development Director of the fundraising collective Creative Partners. The Collective has only been around since January 2013, but in it’s last fiscal year was able to raise a half million dollars for theater and the arts in Chicago! Listen to hear about her journey and how coworking space Design Cloud in Chicago was an indispensable asset for her & Creative Partners!

In this Episode, we get the juicy download from Liz Elam on the Global Coworking Conference Unconference recently hosted in Australia.

Liz is a well-known veteran of the coworking industry. She opened her first Link Coworking space in Austin in 2010 and her second location shortly after. She was a founding member of LEXC, the League of Extraordinary Coworking spaces, and its president for the first two years. She was also the driving force behind CoShare, the industry’s association. And she is the Executive Producer of GCUC (Global Coworking Conference Unconference).

In our conversation, Liz shares what most surprised her about GCUC Australia, GCUC expansion plans and where she thinks coworking will go in the next 5 years.

Listen to this episode with Matthew Viglione as he describes his path from French Literature, to being a Communications Director in the nonprofit world, to deciding to “cut the cord” and launch himself into co-founding SomaSim to follow his real passion of video game design. Matt was coworking at Design Cloud in Chicago

Listen to Sam's story as he describes how he transitioned from running a digital agency out of coffee shops and his girlfriend's apartment, to running his own Chicago coworking space, where he discovered the need for a software to manage coworking spaces and developed the Desktime App.

Sam has the pulse of the coworking industry in his multiple roles. We talk about Chicago's office-loving coworking crowd and the future of corporate coworking.

In this episode, Patrick describes how he overcame hurdles like learning how to properly manage clients and set appropriate expectations, how to develop business relationships, and why becoming a true ‘professional’ is a necessity for any start up business.

He also shares that he might have gone right back to working for the man without the support of his coworking community.

Troy Evans had such a life-changing experience at Syracuse CoWorks that he bought a building to house an expanded version of the coworking space on one floor, colocated with a coliving space on two other floors.

Join us as he illustrates how he was inspired to go from corporate life to coworking life and paints a picture of his experiment with putting coliving and coworking under one roof in an upstate NY city.

Listen to this podcast to learn about how Claire Goforth went from being lawyer, to pursuing her true dream of being a writer.

Claire explains how intimidating it was to leave a career she had gone to school for 8 years for, but decided that happiness and fulfillment was her top priority and decided to take the leap of faith into full time writing & journalism.

Claire stays productive and sane by working in her community at CoWork Jax in Jacksonville, Florida.

Meet Nicole Yeary and hear her journey from insurance agency owner to unemployed, to founder of Ms. Tech. Find out how Nicole transformed what started as a small women’s networking group into a successful, monetizable platform. You’ll want to high-five Nicole when you hear how she upgraded her mobile office from McDonald’s to one of Chicago’s great coworking spaces!

In this episode, Jeff Joerling describes his work with Turnstone, a division of Steelcase, as a self-dubbed “analog collaboration advocate.”

In his role, Jeff tours the country working with collaborative spaces of all flavors - coworking spaces, incubators, accelerators, corporations. Through his experience and his resources at Steelcase/Turnstone, he has become a real expert on what it takes to design a space to support today's mobiel worker.

He shares:

His favorite coworking space

His thoughts on the "privacy crisis"

His view of the open office trend

Tips for designing a "palette of space" to support a range of needs

Ideas for tweaking your space if you didn't get it quite right the first time